POST #2000: THE GINGER-SNAPS feat. DANDEE DAWSON, "THE SH-DOWN DOWN SONG" C/W "I'VE GOT FAITH IN HIM," DUNHILL D-4003 (REL. 6/1965)

This is post #2000 of Frank’s Jukebox. The feature has been continuous, minus a few ecological bumps in the road, since March of 2020, when I posted one side of a Shirelles single on Facebook, got an enormous response, then continued with a record a day, soon with both sides of one of the thousands of records in my collection for 45-rpm discs.

It has been difficult to sustain interest in this enterprise, but the feature had some dedicated followers on Facebook. At the start of this year, I made a stand against the pathetic fascism of Mark Zuckerberg and left Facebook. With plenty of advance notice, and easy access to this site, I announced the transition. Almost no one followed this blog over to its current site. I had been considering that today’s post be the finale for this effort, but a small but persistent uptick in interest has convinced me it’s still work doing.

I offer the opposite of AI slop, that cancerous malady of creativity and critical thinking. I am a human being of some knowledge, experience, wear and tear, and I bring to you—for free, every day of the year—two pieces of music (sometimes more; see last Saturday’s post) with my thoughts on the recordings and what background information I can scare up on anyone associated with their making.

It is important that us human beings continue to populate the internet with real, sincere human content. AI garbage fills the web at a harrowing rate. None of it is believable, logical or worthwhile. I am against AI with all my heart; it represents an existential threat to you and everyone you know. It must be regulated, corralled and disciplined if it is to be any use at all in the continued existence of human life. It is as grave a threat as the thugs, liars and cowards who have seized control of our government. I regard both with scorn, disgust and distrust. Both entities exist to make life worse than it has to be; there’s no reason, aside from greed, for either to be there. Greed for wealth and power is mankind’s most vulgar debit; it looks good on no one and, like racism, is poisonous.

Rest assured, you few who frequent this site, that you have gotten, are getting and will always receive human content from a very human feet-of-clay homo sapiens. I hope you’ll continue to join me as I explore the byways of recorded music from the early 1950s to the late 1960s—the golden age of the seven-inch record.

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In 1965, Lou Adler’s Dunhill Records had just begun. Adler, a former executive at Screen Gems Music’s LA branch, resigned to form the label and took along two valued creators, Phil Sloan and Steve Barri, to function as the imprint’s producers, main songwriters and talent scouts. Sloan and Barri had seen a few of their songs become mid-chart hits by the end of 1964, and Adler had a sense they would come into their own on his new label.

He was right, but not with the expected outcome. Sloan, struck by the songs of Bob Dylan, had a seismic shift at age 19. He wrote “Eve of Destruction,” an expression of horror, frustration and confusion that feels more relevant now than it might have in 1965. Sloan, who made his first record at age 15, was steeped in pop and rock music and never sacrificed his keen instincts for musical hooks and memorable melodies.

Adler, Barri and other associates were baffled by—and wary of—these unusual new efforts, but when folk singer Barry McGuire took his version of “Eve” to #1, and made it the most controversial record of 1965, Sloan’s importance to the company soared. It was a qualified status; Adler remained leery of the youth and advised him to stick to the superb pop material he and Barri penned so well.

Today’s single, the fifth Dunhill release, preceded “Eve” by a month or so. Sloan and Barri wrote on spec for potential appeal to artists who might, just might, record their work. It’s possible they wrote “The Sh-Down Down Song” for Betty Everett, who had recorded three of their songs and had a recent hit with the pop smash “It’s In His Kiss (The Shoop Shoop Song).”

If so, Everett passed, and the song needed a performer. Thus, Sloan approached Los Angeles’ Black-dominated Watts neighborhood and, cap in hand, knocked on doors to inquire if (a) there was a young woman in the family who sang and (b) if she might want to make a record—no strings attached? Naïve though this sounds, Sloan succeeded. Dandee Dawson (a stage name, I’m sure) answered his request and an ad-hoc girl group was born. The Ginger-Snaps are a mystery; another white girl group, The Honeys, who worked with Brian Wilson, recorded demos as The Ginger Snaps (no hyphen); they made some demos of Sloan-Barri songs. It’s possible they could be the backup singers on this one-off single.

They kick off “The Sh-Down Down Song (You Better Leave Him Alone),” and they sound white—and suspiciously like The Honeys. Ms. Dawson is a Black singer, and her double-tracked vocal shows some confidence and control. She might have sung in church prior to this platter.

It’s a grand girl-group drama; our narrator accosts a new girl in town whom, she notes, is sizing up local prospects. See that guy? He’s mine. Taken. Get the picture? We don’t hear the lass’s reply, but I’m sure the message was understood.

The Wrecking Crew back up these singers, including Hal Blaine on drums and Steve Douglas’ distinctive sax solo. I imagine this being a one or two-take song; these musicians picked up on new material, like the cats in Nashville, and ad-libbed their parts with accuracy if not passion. And voila! A record was born.

 

Cash Box made this their Pick of The Week, just below "I Got You, Babe" by

Sonny and Cher on the week of June 26, 1965.

In 2009, after much delayed fuss and bother, I became the co-creator of the first-ever CD compilation of the songs of Sloan and Barri for Ace Records in the UK. On my tracklist was “I’ve Got Faith in Him,” the powerful ballad on the B-side. My more experienced and better-known collaborator made a passionate case for “Sh-Down Down,” which had been anthologized before on LP. Being the junior partner in this effort, I acceded. Thus, this classic piece of musical drama remained dormant. And now that the master tapes no longer exist (they burnt up in the Universal vault fire which perished the original sources of many canonical artists’ work), the singles are its only document.

I’d wanted a copy of this record since the 1980s, when I learned of its existence but had no way to hear it. Records from the ‘60s were very hard to find in the ‘80s; those who’d bought them new, or discovered them in cut-out bins, held onto them with no intention of release.

Many of those collectors have passed on and the market is awash in records that, a few decades before, were rare and quite expensive. I spotted a promo copy of today’s single on Discogs. I knew it was issued on vinyl and styrene. I took a gamble that it was the former and purchased the record. To my delight, it was vinyl. Dunhill used recycled vinyl for its early releases (ground-up and melted-down unsold singles, labels and all), so their materiel tends towards the noisy, but this disc was clean-surfaced and what little noise accompanied the music was subdued by the ClickRepair software program I use to tidy up my daily presentations.

Onto the song: it’s a classic in the “He’s a Rebel”/“He’s Sure the Boy I Love” vein. Everyone thinks he’s a schnook, but he’s got something special; I know he’s gonna make it. A song of devotion and encouragement, it’s sung with pure passion by Ms. Dawson and her Ginger-Snaps in a simple but winning arrangement with trumpet and 12-string acoustic guitar (played by, perhaps, Glen Campbell or Tommy Tedesco).

It's a lovely song and it proved to be Sloan and Barri’s last girl-group-type song until a late 1966 single by Black group The Locketts, which the duo didn’t produce and is super-rare; a copy is currently for sale on Discogs for 500 pounds (approx. 667 dollars).

Thank you for reading today’s post. Perhaps there will be 1,000 more. That’s three years and, barring devastation, I just might make it to 3K. I hope you’ll drop by often; we’re always here for you—human and hopeful.

Tomorrow: Rudy Lewis, an important singer with The Drifters, on his lone solo outing for Atlantic Records. Electric piano, sinister femme chorus, relentless minor-key vibe and a haunting song penned by Rudy Clark on a rare, unappreciated 1963 single of note.